Text 25394, 80 rader
Skriven 2008-12-29 15:09:51 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Special characters
==========================
Hello Robert,

On Monday December 29 2008 08:33, you wrote to me:

 MV>> That works for Germans among Germans, but it will not do for many
 MV>> other languages including Dutch.

 RB> Makes things a bit difficult, but I see you've found solutions.

I can hardly claim it was me who found the solutions, let alone invented them.
It is not difficut, in fact the method of first typing the single quoute
followed by the letter to get the accented version is an emulation of how many
of the old mechanical typewriters that were in use here did it.

The keys with the diacriticals did not move the carrige one position forward as
the ordinary keys. So the accented and umlauted characters were obtained by
first pushing the key for the accent or umlaut and then overstriking it by
pushing the key of the corresponding letter. Of course oif you wanted to type
the accent or umlaut in isoloatio, you had to follow it by a space in order to
move the carriage to the next position.

 RB>>> All I would have to do would be to shut off the translations I
 RB>>> have activated in GoldED.

What translations?

Are you telling met that you have configured Golded the translate *incoming*
accented and umlauted characters into the diftongs? You see the o umlaut in
Börn as oe?

 RB>>> All German keyboards support such things directly, and I have used a
 RB>>> German keyboard since I've been here.

The German keyboard driver....

 MV>> So what about you non Fido (paying) customers? Do they accept the
 MV>> transliterations in what you write for them?

 RB> Since when do you use a fido editor to write non-fido texts?

Actually I sometimes do. I write a montly column for local webiste. I use Glded
for the draft as it works better with my favourite spell checker....

 RB> GoldED and the tranliterations are strictly for fido. For normal texts
 RB> I use WordPerfect 5.1 or MS-Word 2003 - no transliterations necessary
 RB> there.

So for non Fido texts you use accents umlauts and á's. Then I don't see why you
would not use them in Fido either. Surely stone age hardware that can not
display the few special characters in use in German has all been decomissioned
by now?

 RB>>> I think my system is simpler.

 MV>> But no longer up to modern standards. The 26 characters of the
 MV>> ASCII set are just not enough outside Northern America.

 RB> As long as I only write English or German, my readers and I have no
 RB> problems. Maybe I just have a lucky combination.

I think you do. It looks lke german is the excaption in that it has an offical
or at least widely accepted transliteration for the special characters.

 MV>> Once, al very long time ago I advocated adapting the language so
 MV>> that - at least in Dutch - everything could be written with pure
 MV>> ASCII only. I changed my mind. Computers are tools to serve
 MV>> humans, not the other way around. So now I advocate Unicode.

 RB> And that works in GoldED?

My website in unicode (UTF8) and so are my outgoing e-mails.

Golded has a very limited implementation of UTF8. There is some progress but it
is slow....


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MINGW 1.1.5-b20070503
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